The waitress came by, and Rick said, “Why don’t you give us five minutes and another round?” She gave him a nice smile.
Rick said, “I’d like you to look at something.”
“Surely.”
Rick took a sheaf of paper rolled into a cylinder from inside his jacket pocket and handed it to Caleb. “I’m not Bob Greene but…” He shrugged. “I’d like your opinion.”
Caleb unrolled the paper, titled, “A Ribbon for Your Easter Bonnet.” He read:
This started out to be a ho-hum human-interest piece—the obligatory heart tugger about an AIDS hospice—but in the course of researching the story, I met someone who taught me that a hospice is just a place without human interest. What makes human-interest stories is human beings. People, individuals like Manny…
The waitress reappeared with their drinks. Rick asked Caleb, “Are you still hungry?”
“No.”
“Just a check,” Rick told the woman.
Caleb kept reading.
I reject the idea that there has to be suffering involved for something to be pure or true or noble. Bullshit! If someone’s suffering, it means there’s been a fuckup. The continued rapid spread of AIDS is the ultimate fuckup…
Caleb was nearly through when Rick interrupted. “It’s good enough so it won’t embarrass me—my editor’s accepted it—but I’ll never stick my neck out like this again.”
Caleb understood. The article notwithstanding, Rick couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about deeper issues. He was intelligent and sensitive—or sharply perceptive—in his writing, but it was obvious he wasn’t comfortable with emotion or introspection.
…As we come together to celebrate the resurrection, maybe we could resurrect some hope…
When Caleb finished reading, he studied Rick’s face. They thought in different metaphors—as irreconcilable as opera and hockey. Caleb was like a cat, emotionally cautious and reserved; the writer was a dog man, superficially uncomplicated and instantly affectionate.
“Well?” Rick said, figuratively holding his breath.
He wasn’t Bob Greene, but the article was—“Very effective.”
Rick relaxed. “Thanks.”
“May I keep it? For Manny.”
“Sure. I was going to send him a copy.”
There was silence while they sipped their drinks. Caleb felt a twinge of guilt for being snobbish, but he was becoming tired of Rick’s preoccupation with the trivial, his effusiveness, and his instant assumption of familiarity. And he taxed Caleb’s tolerance for talk of sports and weather.
“We’re not working out, are we?” Rick asked. A mind reader.
“To be honest, no.”
“Well, as long as we’re being honest, I hate opera. And I think all cats should be declawed behind the neck.” He said it with a smile.
“What is it you want in a relationship?” Caleb asked.
Rick smiled. “Oh, I don’t know.” He was being evasive. “But I bet you do.”
“Passion and security.”
“Would you settle for one out of two?”
“No.”
“I’m not ready for commitment.”
“I know.”
“I guess you’ve got me analyzed.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Don’t do that shrink thing on me.”
“What is it you’re feeling guilty about?”
“I’m not feeling guilty!”
Caleb raised his eyebrows and smiled knowingly.
Rick reddened. “All right. We don’t have anything in common but good sex.” Caleb waited. Rick blushed again.
“You want out and don’t know how to say so,” Caleb finished for him.
He looked relieved, then looked away. “I feel as if I’ve been taking advantage of you.”
Caleb felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief. He laughed. “I’m over twenty-one. And I’ve been capable of saying no since I was two years old.”
“That’s it, then.” Rick sighed. “The trouble with being sensitive is you get hurt a lot.”
“Your capacity for joy is only as great as your capacity for sorrow.”
“Well, you can go for the joy. I’ll settle for good sex once in a while.” He put his hand out. Caleb gripped it. “No hard feelings?” Rick said.
Just shaking hands felt awkward after everything, but Caleb said, “No.” He reached for the check, but Rick beat him to it.
“I got it. If you’re ever just horny…” He grinned, then emptied his glass in a single long swallow and put it down. “Take your time; finish your drink.”
Caleb sat back and nodded and watched him put on his jacket. He felt simultaneous relief and sadness, but not grief. He had found Rick. He would meet others. You have to kiss a lot of frogs…And somewhere, in a city the size of Chicago, there had to be someone for him. Someone who loved cats and enjoyed opera.
As he followed Rick’s departure with his eyes, he noticed that the amorous couple in the corner had come up for air. He realized he’d seen the woman recently—naked, in Ivan’s collection. It was Irene Yellow. The man she was with was Professor Matthew Dennison. Caleb got up and went to look for a phone.
Instead of calling a cab, he dialed Area Three.
Sixty-One
Thinnes was waiting when Caleb came out of Orly’s. “Where’s your car?” he asked.
“I took a cab. I didn’t want to worry about parking in unfamiliar territory.”
They sat in the Caprice and waited. Even with the windows cracked, their breath condensed on the glass, shutting them off from the surrounding neighborhood. Shutting them in together. Thinnes felt less uncomfortable than he had on the Wisconsin trip. As they discussed the Bisti case, Caleb seemed like a new partner he was finally getting used to.
“We still haven’t figured out why,” he said, “but we’re pretty sure we know who killed Redbird. And Redbird may not have been his first victim.” Caleb waited attentively, so Thinnes told him about the circumstantial case against Elvis, including everything about the dog. He noticed, by the time he finished, that the heat had leaked from the car. He restarted the engine. “His parole officer told me Hale hates Indians even though his father probably was one. Is there such a thing as a Custer complex?”
“Sounds more like an Oedipus complex to me. Or a child’s quite logical hatred for an absent or abusive parent.”
They followed Irene and Dennison to an apartment building—not the address either had given the police—and sat in the car, watching through the windows of the landings as the pair made their way to the third floor, pecking and pawing each other like actors in a steamy movie. When they paused for a long clinch in front of one of the apartment doors, Thinnes sneaked a sideways look at Caleb. What was he thinking? Was watching a straight couple any kind of a turn on for him? Caleb’s face gave away nothing.
After a bit, Caleb said, “Professor Dennison told me he was at the reception to investigate a rumor that David was using genuine Anasazi artifacts in his pieces. The implication was they were illegally obtained. Can we put any credence in that?”
“People lie to the cops. That’s the First Law of Detecting. And the Second Law is: People lie to the cops.”
“People lie to psychiatrists, too.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Same thing you do. Have them go over the story so many times they confuse the details. Then confront them with the discrepancies.”
“Let’s do it, then.”
They gave the subjects a chance to get comfortable, then they followed a tenant into the building lobby. Thinnes flashed his star before the security door closed, and the man dropped any objection he might have had to their following him in. Upstairs, Dennison opened the door.
His face showed disbelief and shock. Irene came to the door behind him, and her expression mimicked his. Thinnes said, “Can we come in?”
Dennison shrugged and stepped back, bumping into her. He had just a towel wrapped around him
, and he tucked the edges in at his waist as he led the way to the living room. Irene was wearing a man’s shirt as a robe, with the sleeves rolled. It looked like she had nothing on under it.
Thinnes and Caleb hung their coats on a coatrack by the door and followed the pair into the living room. They sat on the couch. Irene and Dennison sat on the love seat, opposite. He crossed one leg over the other, not caring whether the other men could see up his “skirt.” Thinnes laughed to himself. The professor would probably be a little more modest if he knew Caleb was gay.
With a little prodding, the couple told their story: Both, it turned out, were on friendly terms with Bisti, who’d headed up a group of artists, Indians, and archeologists bent on putting black-market antiquities dealers out of business—both by dropping a dime to the fuzz whenever they came in possession of incriminating evidence, and by flooding the market with brilliant fakes implied to be the real thing.
“That’s fraud,” Thinnes said.
“Fraud? We never represented them as anything other than what they were—pots made by Indian artists.”
“You didn’t say they were Anasazi?”
“No. We circulated pictures without saying anything except that they were for sale. And they got a chance to look at what they were getting before they put their money down. If they jumped to the wrong conclusions…” He shrugged. “Caveat emptor.”
“What about your spat with David the night he died?” Caleb asked Irene. “You were very convincing. Was it staged?”
She blushed. “Thanks. Yes. We thought a fuss would get free publicity for David’s show and call attention to our ‘Anasazi’ artifacts. There wouldn’t have been any point if it wasn’t convincing. We even had a reporter on the guest list. The plan would have worked if someone hadn’t murdered David.”
“A reporter?” Thinnes said.
“She must’ve caved in to pressure from someone to hush the whole thing up, because there wasn’t a word about it on the society pages, and the only thing in the rest of the paper about David made his death seem like just another semianonymous urban tragedy.” Irene looked at Thinnes. “After David died, Kent pretended not to know about our plan or what happened to all the fake Anasazi pots David had squirreled away.”
“We think he might be selling off the inventory,” Dennison said. “But we have no way of knowing. Each part of the operation was separate. David would bring things to me for my opinion, or have people call me, for advice on how something should be, without giving me their names. David was the linchpin. He had all the names in his head. When he died, they were lost.”
“Who got the money?”
“We all got a little. Various foundations got anonymous gifts. How he did it sometimes was, he’d show a piece to some rich collector and tell him it would be delivered when his check to AIM, or the Smithsonian, or the Heard Museum cleared.”
Irene added, “We weren’t ever in it for the money, so we decided to keep quiet, especially since Kent threatened to tell Matt’s wife about us if we didn’t just go away. Whatever Kent has in mind undoubtedly involves him getting rich, and probably involves fraud—which we’ve carefully avoided. But since it’ll have the same effect on black-market profits as the original plan, we decided to just bow out.”
Thinnes said, “Tell us about Thomas Redbird.”
“I know him slightly,” Irene said. “He does deliveries and odd jobs for David…Did.”
“Did?”
“Now that David’s gone, I don’t imagine there’ll be much work for him.”
Thinnes turned to Dennison. “Doctor?”
“I don’t believe I’ve met him.”
Thinnes pulled out Redbird’s photo. “Look familiar?”
Dennison shook his head.
“What did he do?” Irene asked.
“Got himself killed.”
Irene’s shock seemed genuine. Dennison was indifferent. Why not? If you didn’t know him personally, he was just another Chicago statistic.
They said that all they knew about Harrison Wingate was what David told them; he was a land-raper who never let archeological remains get in the way of a project. They agreed David couldn’t have proved that or he would have turned his evidence over to the police, and were pretty sure that was why he was killed.
“What did you mean when you told your father Bisti was a witch and someone turned his evil around on him?” Thinnes asked Irene.
She made a disgusted face. “I was angry. I was just mouthing off. I didn’t mean it. Ah—David could be a real jerk, sometimes.”
Remembering the question Caleb had asked Lauren Bisti, he said, “What’s the significance of the cougar in Navajo mythology?”
Dennison answered. “In the Bead Chant, members of the cat family give medicinal plants to the People. In other connotations they’re snitches or messengers.”
“Like the Greek god Mercury,” Irene said. “David loved that.”
“Though in Navajo tradition,” Dennison added, “Coyote also performs some of Mercury’s functions. Like Mercury, Coyote’s a thief, and he’s responsible for mischief and chaos.”
“David had to have intended for people to make the connection,” Irene said, “between cougar as a messenger, and artist as messenger.”
“So who killed the messenger?”
When they were back in the car, heading north on the Drive, Thinnes said, “What can you tell me about Navajo witches?”
“Most of what I know, I got from reading Hillerman’s novels,” Caleb said. “I gather you have to understand Navajo philosophy to comprehend witchcraft.”
“Can you put it in a nutshell?”
“They don’t have an organized religion with formal doctrine. It’s more a way of life—in harmony with others and with Nature—like the Tao.”
Thinnes decided not to ask what that was. And he stifled the urge to ask Caleb to get to the point.
“If I understand it correctly, it’s something like the Force in Star Wars. When you follow the Navajo way, the Force is with you. If you embrace the Dark Side, you’re a witch or skinwalker or Navajo wolf—all metaphors for an evil person.”
Sixty-Two
The interview room was lit by overhead fluorescents. Three of its walls were painted cinder block, with hard, molded plastic seats attached to the walls by brackets; the fourth held the door and a one-way mirror window. Xaviar Ocampo was “hanging on the wall”—handcuffed to a giant staple between two of the seats. Outside the room, Thinnes stood with Oster, Viernes, and Rossi, and watched him.
“What page are we on here?” Rossi demanded.
“He’s facing a number of state and federal gun charges at this point,” Thinnes answered. “We think he’ll finger John Buck’s killer to avoid adding murder one.”
Rossi made a face. “When’re you gonna come up with a suspect in the Downtown Indian case? That’s the one generating all the heat. I’m still getting a call a week on that one. Who cares who killed some drunk breed?”
Thinnes turned to Oster, as if Rossi hadn’t spoken, and said, “Let me work on this guy.” Oster nodded. “Viernes, would you get hold of Columbo?”
“Sure.” Viernes turned away without a word to Rossi.
Oster pulled his notebook out of his pocket.
As Thinnes sauntered toward the interview room, he watched out of the corner of his eye as Rossi stood flat-footed while the others walked away, then he hurried off.
Thinnes entered the interview room. “Mr. Ocampo, I’m Detective Thinnes.” Even though he’d heard Ryan run through the drill, he asked, “You’ve been read your rights?” He’d come to the force after Mapp, Miranda, and Escobedo, so he’d never found the landmark decisions to be a particular hindrance. He had heard veteran officers—good men—swear that the controversial decisions actually made for better policing. Not that they’d say so at a gathering of cops.
Losing a beef over Miranda meant either that you’d gotten sloppy and hadn’t done your homework, or that the fix was in. H
e was always careful to avoid being sloppy. And if the case was fixed, there was nothing you could do. So either way, he did his job and didn’t worry about it.
“No hablo Inglés,” Ocampo said.
Thinnes shrugged, concealing his annoyance. He went back to the door and called to Oster loudly enough for Ocampo to hear clearly. “Carl, go get Viernes, would you? Mr. Ocampo seems to have forgotten how to speak English.”
He backed into the room and sat opposite Ocampo, staring without fidgeting or blinking until the dealer looked away. It was going to be easier than he’d thought.
Viernes came in. “What’s with this dipstick?”
“Mr. Ocampo’s feeling so pressured, he can’t remember his English.”
Viernes nodded. “So you need a translator. Shoot.”
“Maybe you’d better start by reading him his rights.”
“Sure.” Viernes took out his Spanish version of the Miranda card and read it. He could have recited it from memory, but some prosecutors liked to have it read so smart-ass defense attorneys couldn’t question the officer’s interpretation. When he finished, he asked, “¿Lo entiendes?” Do you understand?
Ocampo nodded.
“¡Dime, sí o no!” Viernes demanded.
“Sí.”
The Death of Blue Mountain Cat Page 25
